Monday Night Football Recap: We All Suffer for the AFC

My brand of NFL football is all about prejudice and disdain. I watch pro football because my heart is mysteriously infused with bile for places I've never been, for victories that never came. I have 40 years of hard-earned, vaguely pointless, utterly indefensible prejudices like this one: I hate the AFC. Early-season AFC action is always the same. We are all forced to watch these widget receivers with strange names juggling pitch-backs off double-reverses that took all summer for some pasty-faced coach to concoct. Or a recently anointed "best-in-the-league" halfback, like Darren McFadden, everybody's early choice for every award in the league — or at least his coach's, or the ESPN guys re-translating that there recent Sports Illustrated feature from their clip file. And watch, as McFadden himself loses eleven yards after running (hard!) on a strung out draw play. Smack that ball in frustration, Darren! Not to worry. Later in the year, while you're licking your turf-toe, the Patriots, or the Steelers, will take over and the whole world will move on the from the AFC.

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But, really, why schedule two AFC games, back-to-back, on the first blessed Monday night of a new football season?

Yes, I accept that both conferences are pretty much the same. Like every element in American professional football — uniform standards, tweeting rules, the cerebral cortex's of aging linebackers — the league has shoved its whole package in a product blender and set it on mix. The result? Some teams now have preppy collars sewn in their uniforms and others do not. Vive la difference! Vive la NFL!

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Maybe it's an attempt at appeasing a fan base, this scheduling. I know there's nothing rational about hating a football conference, one of two that plays regularly in the same league. But what do I care? Some people don't like the designated hitter. Me, I don't like the soupy, misguided passions of old guys who paint their faces black, squeeze into submissive harnesses and brandish plastic maces in an effort to convince the world of the existence of a Raider Nation. Go back to your TiVo, and squonk your way through until you hit the point where the camera pans over the mighty "East Bay" of Oakland, and you'll see four warehouses and a tilting dock, a scene which brings to mind a Best Buy parking lot in Lansing, Michigan. Raider Nation? Rattle me plastic chains, there isn't even much of a Raider township.

Maybe — in the case of Monday night's twin-billing, featuring the increasingly witless Bengals against the still-anachronistically-uniformed Ravens, nee Browns, in what must still count as a geographic rivalry in the minds of NFL schedule-makers anyway; and the Raiders, trading field goals with the recently EMP'd Chargers — the league blender has been set to GRATE and allowed to blur seven mercilessly dull quarters of skittish, jumpy AFC tradition into one long DVR fast-forward. I say seven quarters because at one point Joe Flacco, the world's least interesting good quarterback, playing for the Ravens, the AFC team that absolutely commits itself every year to playing precisely two weeks into the post season before they quit, actually woke up and stuck some points on the board against one-time NFL-coaching genius Marvin Lewis's assemblage of 53 guys who like wearing similar football uniforms. I only have two more words to say about the Bengals: Andy Dalton. He is the Jon Gruden's little brother of NFL quarterbacks. No, wait: Jon Gruden's little brother is the Andy Dalton of AFC position coaches. It even leaves Jon Gruden speechless. No, wait for it: Andy Dalton is a red-headed fleshbag, who proved on Monday night that he's capable of coming out of every tackle wincing in phantom pain and scowling at his own lineman to be sure the blame is well-assigned in weekly film sessions.

Maybe the double-header is supposed to be a reminder of the work-a-day nature of the pro game. But if an NFL Sunday is a kind of multi-channel orgy, this two-game Monday Night Football thing is like a wife-swap where at least any two of the relevant parties didn't sign off. Why else would you be up at 12:15 on a Monday in September watching for evidence the Raiders punter is the "best ever." (I'm pretty sure even Ray Guy doesn't give a shit.) The highlight of the second game? A blocked punt, naturally. And McFadden's arm-tape patterning, which featured no grass marks at game's end.

Maybe it's just business. What must have seemed like sheer genius to the ESPN cabal during the off — Let's do two games again! One fantastic night, featuring highlights of all the other games that would have been far more fun to watch! ADT commercials out the ying-yang! — clearly stands as an opportunity to roll Chris Berman, the network's only working harelip (with apologies to harelips everywhere, but Berman can't make a word of his grinding verbiage understood when he's off camera; he's in audible without the use of his eyebrows) for a three-night stay at the East Bay La Quinta. So the whole thing might be a kind of corporate punishment.

Ah, we all suffer the AFC these first few weeks. These games will be forgotten like so many morning commutes. I decided, right after my favorite schnorer Philip Rivers failed for the sixth time to engineer a fairly routine touchdown drive, that I've been watching some version of Norv Turner, that mouth-breathing ex-offensive genius, standing on the sideline, headset askew, amazed the his genius doesn't grab hold, since I was young. No, wait. That was really him, Turner himself, or some version of the lesser conference, standing there every year since God knows when. For decades.

I know. So mean. But I told you: I hate the AFC. Especially six hours of it on a Monday in September.

As for Turner, well, bless his heart, as my Dixified ex-wife used to say about anybody she met at the shopping mall. And bless this game. Because Week Two approaches, and the NFC will be there. Stay tuned.